Re: MAME emulator is giving incentive to use non-free software

[Ludovic Courtès]

Mark H Weaver <address@hidden> skribis:

> Jean Louis <address@hidden> writes:
>> Put yourself in the view point of free software user. What such user is
>> going to do with WINE?
>
> WINE has at least one useful purpose for a free software developer: to
> help them develop and test Windows ports of their software compiled with
> MingW.
>
> For example, it is important for GNU Guile to run on Windows because
> programs that already depend on Guile (e.g. GNU Lilypond), and programs
> that we hope will use Guile in the future (e.g. GNU Emacs) include ports
> for Windows.  The Windows ports of both of the aforementioned programs
> are useful for introducing the free software movement to Windows users.

I wondered about this at the time WINE was submitted and I came to the
same conclusion:

  https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2014-11/msg00333.html

> MAME is a different case.  FWIW, here's a Parabola ticket on the
> question of MAME:
>
>   https://labs.parabola.nu/issues/961
>
> I'd like to know if there are any free programs that can be run under
> MAME and cannot be run natively on GNU/Linux.  Can anyone answer this
> question?

It would also be useful to know whether people are using/trying to use
the hardware MAME emulates to run free software on it, whether there are
reverse-engineering efforts that would likely benefit from it, etc.
IOW, can we conceivably think of use cases other than running non-free
games?

Thanks,
Ludo’.